[MacRuby-devel] scientific plotting engine

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Dec 30, 2010, at 1:56 PM, Jonathan Mace wrote:

> I just downloaded and installed MacRuby, and am new to this, although I do have an (old) background in programming as it relates to physics.  I'm wondering if there is a general scientific plotting engine, e.g., GNUplot or something similar, that anyone could recommend for integrating into custom MacRuby-Cocoa programs (general/customizable 2D and 3D capabilities, and data visualization).  In particular, is there an existing package that nicely takes advantage of OS X 10.6 frameworks within the context of the PDF kit?  

You're basically looking for a "Core Graphics Canvas" class and, AFAIK, it doesn't really exist yet, though I'm sure a lot of Mac app developers have gone and implemented their own for internal use many times over.  Making a truly generic plotting canvas is kind of hard, and I think only Tcl/Tk has really come close with its TkCanvas object (which, actually, you could certainly instantiate via an ObjC class which fronted for all of the Tk initialization / communication and created a Canvas object embedded in the view of your choice, but man, that would be one byzantine solution!).  Other than that, most folks just hack something up specifically to spec in CG and wrap an ObjC class around it, at which point it can be freely called from MacRuby.

- Jordan

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